Blog #5 Discourse Community

Dass righttt. It's me, complaining again about having to write this blog. Though it's 100% better than writing regular rhetorical essays, I still hate it. You know I was reading people's post and realized some of them aren't 750-1000 words. So I'm sitting here contemplating on whether or not I should write that many words.. or have I been wasting my time trying to grind out 750+ words...... -____-

Anyways Discourse Community, genres, sweet ol' Devitt with the 15 PAGE writing, I don't know where to starttt. SO many great choices. -.-

Based on today's lecture and my very brief scanning of this 8 page beauty...... I would like to convince you that the meaning behind this Discourse Community is that it is a type genre, vocabulary, goals that a certain group of people choose to speak/share with each other. Genre meaning a specific type of communication that has a certain form, technique, you know what I mean. And if you don't know what I mean let please refer back to our great dear friend Devitt. Because I would like to refrain from going back to that good stuff. But what i will say is that genre awareness is key to this discourse community.  Just like writing assignments in class, speaking a certain genre requires you to know the structure of the language. If you don't know how to write/speak the genre of the language you aren't in the community.

Let's touch on same examples. Hmmmm... Servers (obviously the one we've been referring back to in class) are a discourse community because they write in a certain way when taking orders, that no one else really writes other than other servers. Another example is are PT's (another example we went over haha) they write their SOAP notes which depict a discourse community. Lastly software engineers or computer science majors are another discourse community. All of these examples have a specific form of writing that has different goals within their setting of work.

Since I'm already throwing out examples, lets see how computer science majors/software engineers are a discourse community. Now i'm telling you now I'm probably 90% wrong but this is my attempt. Swales first characteristic starts that the community has a common public goal. The goal of software engineers are to create programs that perform certain "tasks" by putting together different computer languages i.e java, c++ etc. The second characteristic is intercommunication which they talk, email etc. The third  characteristic is "participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information or feedback, in this" in this case it is to provide information. The fourth characteristic is possessing one or more genres, which refers to the different computer languages used when programming. The fifth  characteristic is lexis, which is like coding to programming. Lastly the sixth characteristic is the membership threshold, which i feel like in terms of software engineers, is that they will always be software engineers and be part of that specific community.

Well that last paragraph was super repetitive but it's a blog so OH WELLLLLL:) I honestly don't feel confident about the accuracy of that last paragraph but Im going to just go with it. Correct my if I'm wrong though because I'll keep thinking that everything i wrote was correct if no tells me I'm wrong.

Anyways I'm super stressed. It's crazy how I have yet to procrastinate this semester and yet I have so much work to get done. I've done all my assignments and studying the same day it's assigned or right after class and yet I have so much to do. HOWWWW. I guess it's inevitable. At least I got this assignment over with, so I can focus on the other 942 things I have to do.

Also I am trying to eat healthy starting next week. Not necessarily the meal prep stuff like counting macros etc. but I want to start eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner with some snacks in between rather than just having just lunch everyday. (No time to eat when you a college student that works at the superior court) I go to the gym but what's going to the gym if you aren't eating the right foods. So hopefully I can stay committed to eating healthy like how i'm committed to hitting 750 words because I don't want to risk losing points for not grinding out the minimum amount of words. haha If you guys have any HEALTHY recipes you would like to share I would love to hear/try them :)

Blog #4: JSTOR

Imma just leave this right here so you guys can let it soak in while I read these articles.. BRB.

Okay I'm back... I choose to talk about the articles Viral Black Death, Donald Trumps Bet: We are all Chumps, and Why this Election Feels Never-Ending. All 3 articles are of predominant topics, not necessarily worldwide (maybe) but specifically in the United States.

Before I continue, I just want to let you guys know I always misinterpret ethos, pathos and logos even though I know its credibility, emotions and logic. So disregard all of the misinterpretations I might say. On the WPA I said ethos was pathos and pathos was ethos and argued the wrong things for the wrong word but I still got a 8 so WE GOOD. Anyways..

Viral Black Deaths was the first because it is everywhere on social media. I'm the type of person to see things on social media and actually research about them to both verify the accuracy and learn about the situation. And this is one that I find myself looking up very often. I'm assuming the author is Kimberly Fain based on the fact that there is a little section that describes who she is at the bottom, but that's because I'm so used to seeing "by (the authors name)" right under the header or at the end of the article. She argues that it's our choice to read/look at these videos but it should be our responsibility to educate ourselves on these problems. Fain utilizes multiple activists, scholars to solidify all of her claims or as she says to #staywoke. She uses W.E.B Du Bois to depict (ongoing) stereotypes that once supported white supremacy, which is a huge factor in this war against law enforcers and the public (specifically African Americans). She also reminds readers of the repulsive acts of lynching to show the extent a minority will go when they truly believe in something, in this case white supremacy. Not sure if she uses any logos in this article, correct me if I missed it!! But I feel like Fain's methodology was to ensure that though its voluntary people should want to know what is going on, remind readers of the historical events stereotyping once caused, why the events that are happening today align with those in the past, and that people are reposting, voicing their opinions and making headline stories about it everyday because nothing has really changed. At this point, African Americans don't feel like there is actually equality. Not only African Americans, but everyone that supports the claim that equality is only preached but never truly practiced, feel that they have only one outlet to solving this problem and thats SPEAKING UP.

Donald Trump.... Hilary Clinton... Oh how Imma miss the Obamas.

Donald Trumps Bet: We are all Chumps was a shorter article compared to the last one and the one I will be speaking about after this one but it was to the point. The Editorial Board used Trumps' son Eric as a credible source, they use the things Trumps didn't show or do compared to all other candidates in both this election and prior elections, and not sure if any logos was used in this article either, again correct me if I'm just blind to logos. I felt like this article was just a gun unloading bullets at the target on Trumps back. I don't blame them, or maybe I'm just opinionated, or maybe they just did a really good job persuading readers. Running for office, I'd expect the candidate would do anything they can to lie. Just kidding, not really, but they would try to do anything they can to gain trust. For Trump not to release tax forms, have no policy proposals, and have no prior public office experience, it's like drawing his name blindly from a hat. From what I have seen on the news, for someone that doesn't really have any good reasons to win, except for the fact that he uses "I'm a business man" and he always yells obnoxiously at events to keep him, his image doesn't really scream I'm going to be a good president, at least from my opinion.

Why this Election Feels Never-Ending, now this article was more lengthy. Not going to lie after reading the other two than seeing this one, I went back and tried to find another shorter article but then realized I would have to go back and change my first paragraph so I stuck with it. This article talks about what the title says and I couldn't agree more. Emma Roller people from Brandon Silverman, a co-founder of CrowdTangle to Thomas Patterson, a Harvard political scientist to explain why the election has been dragging on, instead of just voicing her own opinion. This article DOES HAVE logos. Finally. She includes CrowdTrangle's research on how interactions on social media has quadrupled compared to the 2012 election. This ultimately is like super glue to Roller's whole argument because if people are more active and more prone to intervene in the candidate election there is something significantly different this election year. Whether it's good or bad (it's bad) it makes me and maybe even some of you feel like, dang it's really between these two people. Someone that is plastered all over the news about how she handles confidential information poorly and someone that is also plastered all over the news about how obnoxious and mistrusting he is.

I'd have to say the JSTOR (Viral Black Death) held my attention more than the two Op-ed. But regardless, I feel like depending on the topic and how the author writes about it, dictates whether I'll keep reading or just move on to the next.

I was motivated to write, but as I got more into the Donald Trump articles, I lost motivation. Bye.

Blog #2 Genres Genres Genres

Welpp..

After only taking 1 RWS class and 0 English classes at state, it was a STRUGGLE to read through that 15 page reading. Not going to lie, I read at least 40 of those sentences 4 times due to the fact that my mind drifted midway through the first word. Don't get me wrong though I like reading, just I tend to be more attentive when it is my GENRE of my choosing. 

Amy Devitt.. she was sent from heaven to bless us with some knowledge. As students, I know we ALL have asked ourselves "When are we EVER going to use "(insert subject/concepts here)" in our field of work". Amy is here to shed a little light on how we have been brainwashed to believe that writing is just a blueprint we must follow in all of our writing, rather than seeing it as a way to expand our creativity as writers through other genres of writing.  Devitt defines genre as "social and rhetorical actions" that enables creativity and originality. Though due to the lack of "critical genre awareness", teaching genres has become more of a barrier. 

SDSU has had an honor of blessing me with this thing I'd like to call "The 5 annoying paragraphs of death" papers or the 5 paragraph papers for short. Either one, it's very dreadful to say/hear. However, I have to admit it has taught me how to formally argue an opinion and then counter argue it then counter the counter argument, regardless of how I really feel about the original argument.  At my job, everything I write on are pre-made court documents so I guess you can say it's fill in the blank type stuff. Nothing really unique except for the fact that it doesn't require much thought when because it isn't what I want, it's what the city wants. As for my life... Resumes, Emails and Texting are the big 3. Resumes and emails are always written in a professional manner, unless you don't actually want the job your applying for or you want your professor to hate you. Texting on the other hand is my paradise of illiteracy and improper grammar (though I'm pretty sure my grammar isn't so hot writing these blogs).

Back to the 5 paragraph essays, we have learned, written, and been critiqued on that genre of writing so many times that it should be a tool for all of us to use in the future. But this isn't the case for most of us. Am I right? It's understandable if we learned about it once or twice but a majority of the time? It has left us uneducated about other genres of writing we encounter now and are likely to encounter later. 

Critical genre awareness, Devitt emphasizes, is teaching the background of genres rather than just giving students templates to follow. Make available the culture and history of the genre without giving us exact instructions we must follow in order for our writing to be deemed that specific genre.  It allows us to depict what we think the genre is in our words, in our way.  If we can't take genres that we learn and make our own versions of it can we really call it our writing? or can we really say we are growing as writers? We are just filling in the blanks of a template. So every time we think of english classes or writing classes we have it engraved in our heads that it's the 5 paragraph structured essays and nothing else. Which is what Devitt is trying to argue when she states "Without developing their genre awareness, people are more at the mercy of existing genres and existing power structures and dynamics" (347). If we don't know anything but the structure of a genre we are prone to follow/write in that form.

And that’s what we have been doing for the past years.  Teachers have just been choosing the genres they want to teach, skipping the in between, and going straight into the paragraph structure. And now here we are 1 genre smarter, 50 more to go. I wonder why so many teachers choose to teach this type of writing and why they decided not to branch out into other genres that may help students in the real world.  

I find it weird that the whole time I was writing this blog, I kept forgetting it’s a blog and that I didn’t need to answer and follow the format of Professor Flewelling’s blog. But I tried to but then I drifted off into my own thought, so I had to go back and erase and try to answer them. And at the same time I felt like I NEEDED to put quotes and argue why she said what. Again this is just me lacking critical awareness and trying to format my writing according to the 5 paragraph writing. The most frustrating feeling when you have the freedom to write in your own way but you’re habits eat away at you but you end up feeling like you just wrote a whole lot of something everywhere. GREAT. 

Till next timeeee....